A few more days passed in the base, and then Zaos finally began to receive some messages from the scouts sectioned by Melisse. She was actually the first messenger. Since she was a lieutenant, she returned before her disappearance could cause problems.

"We didn't notice any big movement from the enemies yet," Melisse said. "They are sending some ravens on a regular basis to their home country, but they aren't leaving the town yet. However, they increased the number of guards in the walls."

"Is that so…" Zaos said while he studied the map that he had drawn himself. "Can our scouts notice if the enemy scouts are around here or if they keeping an eye in the other towns and villages between here and their base?"

"We can find some, but it shouldn't be many," Melisse said. "The scouts are watching all the entrances of that town, and we didn't notice any weird movements at night."

"You think you can help me find the scouts in the area?" Zaos asked. "I can find them even at night, but I can't pinpoint the best places they could use."

"I can, but why do you want to do that? The enemies will send other scouts anyway," Melisse said.

"Well, I just want to buy some time while we obtain control over these villages along the way," Zaos said and pointed to some points on the map. "If we make the villagers move and we take their places, we will be able to surprise the enemies. The mercenaries are bound to invade those points eventually, and I noticed that some people still live there. So this is a good opportunity."

Cohnal and Melisse looked at each other, trying to visualize Zaos's plans. It seemed that he thought that the enemies wouldn't take those places with many numbers, and he wanted to use that to decrease the enemies' force. That seemed like a good idea, but that would take some time for his troops, and they wouldn't be able to drill every day like they were doing right now.

"I think it might work," Cohnal said. "The real problems will be to convince the villagers to leave their homes and the fact that our soldiers don't have much experience doing that."

"On the other hand, if the surprise attacks work, our soldiers will obtain some battle experience while fighting in favorable conditions," Melisse said. "Also, by taking out the scouts, we might be able to hide a lot of troops around the area or inside the homes. By doing so, we will have the chance to wipe out the groups that will attack those places, and their base won't know what happened."

  Cohnal tried to find some flaws in the plan, but aside from the two, he mentioned earlier. Instead of worrying about the flaws, Cohnal began to think which soldiers would work best in which positions.

"We can go with that plan, but we will have to reallocate our scouts in order to take down the enemies as soon as they leave their base," Cohnal said.

"We can form a line between us and the base, and that will suffice," Melisse said. "I will send the message to the scouts today, and we will ambush the scouts tomorrow at night. You should prepare our soldiers to move to the villages the day after tomorrow as soon as the sunrise."

"All right," Cohnal said. "Is that all, Captain?"

"Yes, good work," Zaos said.

  Zaos waited until the next day, and after sunset, he and Melisse left the base by using the windows of his room. That part of the base was pretty dark, so the chances of they being found out were pretty low. They silently left the base by moving in the darkness, and it didn't take long for Zaos to find a presence hidden in the darkness.

  Zaos touched her shoulders since that was the sign for Melisse to stop, and then he moved onward in the direction of the enemy. Once Zaos was close enough to hit the enemy, he used Light in the Darkness to improve his eyesight. After that, Zaos fired a Wind Sword toward them. The presence disappeared, and then Zaos led Melisse to the place the corpse was. Melisse couldn't help but frown since Zaos hit and beheaded the enemy in a single strike, even though he was more than one hundred meters away.

  While she was a bit surprised since Zaos had too many skills, but she didn't waste time with that and then began to move to the spots around the base that she would use to hide if she were an enemy. In the end, they found and killed seven scouts around the base in three hours. Just to make sure that they didn't miss anything, they increased their range of search and moved around the base again. Once they confirmed that they dealt with all the spies, they buried the corpses in the same grave a hundred meters away from any spot they had used.

"Where did you learn all that, Captain?" Melisse asked.

"That is the first time you ever called me Captain," Zaos said.

"That wasn't the question," Melisse said.

"True… well, I just happened to be lucky," Zaos said. "Some skills I trained because I thought it would be useful on the battlefield. I was trained from an early age to become a soldier and then a commander, after all. As for the other skills, I just stumbled upon them."

"That is very convenient," Melisse said.

"I couldn't agree more," Zaos said.

  Everything was too suspicious, but in the end, Melisse couldn't find any explanation. The only thing she could imagine was that Zaos a spy from an enemy nation to kill the royal family, but he had plenty of chances to do that and, in fact, protected Ameria for several months in an enemy country. In the end, Melisse assumed that Zaos was only a worked person who got lucky. That was also suspicious, but it made more sense than her previous theory.